Solo Work

Sonic Essay, 50 Minutes, 6 Channel Audio

Beyond Beyond Festival, 2019

Nadezhda Kutepova is a human rights lawyer from Ozerk, Russia, a formerly secret city that was part of the Soviet Union’s international archipelago of nuclear extraction and weapons productions facilities. This sprawling project reached from her hometown in Russia to the uranium mines of Erzgebirge, East Germany, all the way the Semipalatinsk explosion fields of Eastern Kazakhstan and beyond. Kutepova had to flee Russia after being accused of international espionage. She currently lives under political asylum in France.

In the fall of 2017, a cloud of radioactive materials fell over Europe, which scientists have until recently been unable to trace to its source. This year, the former Plutonium production plant in Kutepova’s hometown, now a nuclear processing plant, was finally found to have been the cloud's point of origin.

shred the means brings together tinnitus and electromagnetic noise as metaphors for the undetectability and pervasiveness of radioactive contamination, which plagues Kutepova’s hometown and many sites in the world that were subjected to nuclear extraction, processing and weapons testing during the Cold War.

shred the means was presented at Beyond Beyond, a sonic installation space by Gretchen Blegen with live-performances by Mars Dietz, HATAM, Hila Lahav and Jasmine Guffond. With remote viewing reports by Catalina Insignares and Carolina Mendonça. kunsthauskule.de/beyond-beyond

This is a recording of the live performance.